From Approval to Grace

We all long to be received, embraced, affirmed, and celebrated in spite of our many failings.

But, as many before me have observed, our families are so often based on fickle, conditional approval instead of on the free dispensing of redemptive, celebrating love.

Heritage of Comparing

In my own case, my mom’s Asperger’s and my dad’s hyper-conditional German upbringing combined to deny my sister and I a sense of ever being good enough, sufficient enough, or pleasing enough to attain that coveted status of “fully approved”.

Whenever we brought our accomplishments to their attention, we were compared unfavorably (in our minds) to our sibling.

“That’s fine.  Now let me tell you how your brother (or sister) did even better in this other area of life (you happen to suck at)…”

My sister was the social butterfly with many friends, and I envied her this social strength that I had so little of.

I was the academic high-achiever, and she was always told by parents and teachers, “I hope you’re as good a student as your older brother….”

Instead of entering into our celebrations, there was this default kind of comparing response–like our best was never good enough.

Eye Openings In Adulthood

I never really saw it until our own kids arrived and, whenever we shared the great things going on in their lives, my parents’ only response was to talk about my sisters’ kids’ triumphs.

It was then I realized that’s exactly what happened to my sister and I all the time growing up.

Each of us thought the other was their favorite, while we felt like the goat of the family.

They were Jacob, and we were Esau.

When we traded notes later in life, we realized that both of us were constantly compared unfavorably to the other by this default response of my parents.

Both of us took great pains to celebrate our own children’s many little victories and never compare them to their siblings or their cousins (at least consciously).

And both of us now realize my parents did what they did not out of malice but out of ignorance and out of their own emotional deficits and upbringing.

Inability Not Malice

As my recovery progressed, I became more able to calmly ask my parents about their upbringing and hear their story.

Which helped me to see that, whatever their deficits, my parents truly did improve on whatever was done to them as children.

Having never been celebrated for themselves, and having grown up in the Great Depression period where economic survival was an all-consuming quest, they never learned how to enter into the victories of others and freely celebrate them without comparison to anyone else.

Their job was to be ever useful and expect no praise.

Which is why, upon hearing a child share a success, they saw it as opening up the subject of “success” and politely intended, “while we’re on that subject, let me tell you about other peoples’ successes”.

Like a deflector ray–always beam success away to someone else and never beam it back.

Which unintentionally starved their own children of emotional affirmation and unconditional approval.

And so my sister and I keep questing after freely-given approval and unconditional celebration in our own styles and ways throughout our lives.

And both of us found our answer by looking up.

Beyond Approval to Grace

God, instead of waiving the conditions that needed to be satisfied, met them all permanently and perfectly in His Son and now offers us the gift of perfect success and perfect approval.

It’s one of the reasons why the grace of God, which I encountered transformingly at 17, has been so precious to me–a lifeline and a key to healing.

And it’s one of the reasons why, after receiving oceans of saving grace, His grace has continued to patiently work with my own affirmation-starved, comparison-hurt soul these 35 years.

I’ll never “arrive” in this life, but the ministrations of God’s redemptive love keep opening my eyes, freeing up my heart, and training my mind and my mouth to speak grace to others in a grace-starved world.

What good we never can or will receive from our fallen parents, or whatever emotional injuries we received from them instead, there is an infinite source of the right kind of love that does no evil and that does us the supreme favor of breaking our generational chains of ungrace.

Though I relapse from time-to-time into depression and despair from encounters with disapproving, comparing, cruelly-judging human beings, I have a trusted, proven place I can always go to be re-centered, refreshed, and re-healed by re-encountering His grace at the bottom of my life.

There is a solution!